Duke Law Duke Law Scholarship Repository Duke Law Student Papers Series Student Works 2010 The oP wer of Posner: A Study of Prestige and Influence in the Federal Judiciary Ryan P. Thompson Duke Law School, [email protected] Christopher C. McCurdy Duke Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/studentpapers Part of the Judges Commons Repository Citation Ryan P. Thompson & Christopher C. McCurdy, The oP wer of Posner: A Study of Prestige and Influence in the Federal Judiciary (2010) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Duke Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Duke Law Student Papers Series by an authorized administrator of Duke Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Power of Posner: A Study of Prestige and Influence in the Federal Judiciary By Christopher C. McCurdy, Ryan P. Thompson* Introduction: Every judge shapes the law, but few judges have the influence to transform the law over time and across jurisdictions. Members of the legal community often marvel at the degree to which individual judges vary among their peers in terms of prestige and influence. Most judges are respected jurists, meting out justice and striving to apply the law faithfully and equitably. They often perform this service in relative obscurity.1 But some jurists are set apart from the pack, becoming established figures in the legal world; their judicial activities take them from obscurity to prominence, making them household names for lawyers, academics, and judges across the nation. These rare judges and their ideas become synonymous with excellence in the legal academy. Names like Marshall, Cardozo, Hand, Holmes, and Friendly transcend the relative obscurity that surrounds most judges. These judges stand out for the degree to which their ideas have surpassed precedential value, changing the American legal system and the popular conception of what it means to be a great judge. But what accounts for this influence? The easy answer is that many of these judges served on the United States Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justices, especially Chief justices, are increasingly visible and familiar figures in the legal community, and the opinions that write are binding on all lower courts. Beyond this, the reasons for influence become more complicated. Judges seem to be strongly motivated by the desire to be seen by others (and to be able to see themselves) as good judges,2 and there is evidence that prestige can translate into influence.3 Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit *The authors are affiliated with Duke University School of Law. For comments, special thanks go to Deans Paul Carrington and David Levi, and to Professors Stuart Benjamin, Michael Bradley, George Christie, and Mirya Holman. 1 RICHARD A. POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK 60 (Harvard University Press 2008). 2 Id. at 60-62. See also LAWRENCE BAUM, JUDGES AND THEIR AUDIENCES: A PERSPECTIVE ON JUDICIAL BEHAVIOR 3 (Princeton University Press 2006) (“[J]udges, like other people, get satisfaction from perceiving that other people view them positively.”). 3 See David Klein and Darby Morrisroe, The Prestige and Influence of Individual Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals, 28 J. LEGAL STUD. 371 (1999). Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1563509 can arguably be called the most influential judge currently on the bench, but what is it that sets Judge Posner apart?4 Before taking the bench, Judge Posner was an outspoken champion of the law and economics movement. Since taking the bench, Posner has become a staple in legal casebooks.5 In addition to his ubiquity in textbooks and law review articles, his name continues to show up in public discourse6 and peer judge interviews.7 He has also published seminal treatises on the theoretical underpinnings of many areas of law, using economic analysis to justify existing law and to suggest new directions in which the law should proceed. However, praise for Judge Posner is not unanimous. When he was first nominated to the Seventh Circuit, the ABA federal judiciary committee gave Judge Posner a tepid “qualified/not qualified” rating.8 Additionally, a recent study identified Judge Posner as only an average jurist. Empirical research by Robert Anderson ranked Judge Posner the 269th best circuit judge (out of 383).9 We concede that prestige among and influence over one‟s peers does not always indicate a greater level of judicial quality but, unlike these critiques, our concern is not with judicial 4 See Stephen J. Choi and G. Mitu Gulati, Choosing the Next Supreme Court Justice: An Empirical Ranking of Judge Performance, 78 S. CAL. L. REV. 23, 51 (2004) (noting that Judge Posner was cited 1,406 times between 1998 and 2000, putting him at the top of the list and “over four standard deviations above the sample mean”). Additionally, in Klein and Morrisroe‟s study using invocation data to evaluate prestige among the judiciary, Judge Posner ranked third on the list of the “Top Twenty-Five Prestige Scores, 1989-91,” supra note 3, and Klein refers to Posner as “one of the most respected of federal judges,” MAKING LAW IN THE UNITED STATES COURTS OF APPEALS 132 (Cambridge University Press 2002). 5See Mitu Gulati and Veronica Sanchez, Giants in a World of Pygmies? Testing the Superstar Hypothesis with Judicial Opinions in Casebooks, 87 IOWA L. REV. 1141 (2002) (showing that 118 Judge Posner opinions appeared in casebooks used in the 1999-2000 school year – ten times more than 90% of federal circuit judges). 6 See William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, Citations, Age, Fame, and the Web, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 319 (2000). In this piece, Landes and Posner utilize Fred Shapiro‟s data on citations to legal scholars and compile additional data on citations to legal scholars as “public intellectuals.” In each list, Judge Posner places in the top 15. 7 See Klein, supra note 4. Klein states that judges “develop opinions about other individual judges . .[m]ost of those interviewed seemed quite at home with the notion that some of their colleagues were better (or thought to be better) than others.” Id. at 93. In the following pages, Klein provides excerpts from judicial interviews, more than one of which mention Judge Posner by name as being influential. 8 John R. Lott, Jr., Op-Ed., Pulling Rank, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 25, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/opinion/25Lott.html?_r=1 (noting that this is true of judges Posner, Easterbrook, and Wilkinson, despite the fact that “these three judges, especially Judge Posner and Judge Easterbrook, wield unrivaled influence”). The American Bar Association rates judicial nominees as "exceptionally well qualified," "well qualified," "qualified," or "not qualified." If committee members disagree on a rating, both ratings are indicated in the final rating. See American Bar Association, Ratings for Judicial Nominees, http://www.abanet.org/scfedjud/ratings.html (last visited Feb. 28, 2010). 9 Robert Anderson, Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the U.S. Court of Appeals, (CELS 2009 4th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Paper, July 12, 2009), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1433442. In his study, Anderson differentiates between “positive” and “negative” citations, using the relative numbers of each value to help determine the rank of each judge. As we mention above, we find these distinctions misleading insofar as using the labels “positive” and “negative” invokes notions of common parlance and not the (very different) technical distinction followed by the Shepard‟s service. 2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1563509 performance but with prestige and influence in the federal judiciary. More specifically, we want to investigate Judge Posner‟s influence within the judiciary, and how that influence has changed over time. Prior scholarship has looked at judge Posner‟s influence within a snapshot of time, but we are not aware of any research that has empirically examined the evolution of his influence since his appointment to the bench.10 To gauge the depth and pervasiveness of his influence over time, we collected data on citations to court opinions authored by Judge Posner. We believed that quantifying and tracking Judge Posner‟s influence on the judiciary would allow us to move beyond the subjective methods by which legal figures are often evaluated. Judge Posner has had a substantial impact on the modern judicial landscape, but it is unclear exactly how influential he has been and how that influence has changed over time. Exploring these questions sheds new light onto the life cycles of “superstar” judges and, at the least, helps us understand Judge Posner‟s meteoric rise in the judiciary. The existing literature on the influence of judges is characterized by theories about the quality of each judge and the quality of the opinions they author. Perhaps the most compelling theory regarding the extraordinary popularity of judges like Posner is the “superstar theory” espoused by economist Sherwin Rosen.11 The theory posits that conditions unique to the legal academic market cause citation rates of superstar judges to increase exponentially over time. The indication here is that, over time, some portion of the prominence that influential legal figures enjoy is partially created and perpetuated by that prominence. This effect is possible because the use of a judge‟s name and ideas is free. This causes a select few judges and scholars to become much more widely cited (thus more widely recognized) than their colleagues.12 In addition to the superstar effect increasing the influence of a judge, it can also give a judge a disproportionate impact on the legal canon.13 If this effect operates in the case of Judge Posner, we would expect it to begin some years after his appointment to the federal bench and amplify his citation and invocation rates over time.